The fintech sector was quite under pressure during the first half of July, with multiple massive hacks (translating in multiple losses of dollars) hitting several organizations, some of which were hit twice during this fortnight, such as Multichain (that lost a total of 228 million dollars worth despite it is not clear if the incidents were real cyber attacks or a rug pull) or even Rodeo Finance that lost the equivalent of “only” 1.5 million dollars. Another fintech company hit hard was Poly Network, which lost the equivalent of 4.4 million dollars, and in the same time the Financial Time revealed that In early 2022, threat actors exploited a zero-day flaw in Revolut to steal more than $20 million.

In terms of mega breaches, the personal information of nearly 35 million Indonesian passport holders was put up for sale on the dark web for $10,000 by a notorious hacktivist with the moniker of Bjorka, while HCA Healthcare disclosed a data breach impacting an estimated 11 million patients.

The Cyber Espionage front was quite crowded this fortnight, with multiple high-profile campaigns unearthed and carried out by known threat actors against organizations in Ukraine, such as Gamaredon and GhostWriter. Other interesting events, just to mention a few, include a campaign dubbed SmugX carried out by a Chinese threat actor and targeting embassies and foreign affairs ministries in multiple countries, the supply chain attack against JumpCloud by the North Korean Lazarus Group, the attack launched by RomCom against the NATO Summit attendees, the campaign launched by the Iranian Charming Kitten against experts in Middle Eastern affairs and nuclear security, and the widespread attack, orchestrated by a Chinese group dubbed Storm-0558 against 25 organizations worldwide, including U.S. and Western European government agencies, using forged authentication tokens,

In terms of hacktivism: the Cyber Partisans attacked the largest university in Belarus (Belarusian State University – BSU), the Ukrainian IT Army took down the Russian state-owned railway company RZD, SiegedSec continued their campaign against the U.S. and  KromSec leaked the personal information belonging to more than 1,100 employees of the French Ministry of Justice.

My suggestion is always the same: browse the timeline, and obviously thanks for sharing it and supporting my work in spreading the risk awareness across the community. As always, don’t forget to follow @paulsparrows on Twitter, or even connect on Linkedin, for the latest updates.